High School Reading Grades 11 12 Quiz
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PASSAGE
From an op-ed by an economist writing in the aftermath of a market panic:
Among the many curiosities of financial crises is the discovery, always fresh, that the experts did not see it coming. Newspaper columnists demand accountability; commissions are appointed; textbooks are revised. And yet, within a decade, the cycle resumes: complacency, exuberance, collapse, astonishment. Why do we not learn?
The usual answer is that memories are short and greed is long. This is true but insufficient. The deeper problem is that the very act of preparing for the last crisis makes the next one more likely. Regulators tighten the rules that failed; capital flees to sectors the rules do not yet reach; risk accumulates in those unwatched corners until it detonates there instead. The system does not fail to learn. It learns exquisitely—but what it learns is how to disguise its next failure as something novel.
This suggests that the ambition to make finance 'crisis-proof' is not merely difficult but incoherent, like designing a maze that no mouse can solve. A better ambition would be to make crises survivable: to build institutions that absorb shocks rather than deny them, and to teach the public that the periodic collapse of confidence is not an aberration in the system but a feature of it. This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of maturity, which is what we ask of individuals and, occasionally, ought to ask of societies.
The author's argument depends most directly on which of the following claims?
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